Prague, July 31 (CTK) – The Czech Technical University (CVUT) has saved 5.6 million crowns on heating of its buildings since 2010 thanks to the system of model predictive control installed by experts from its Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL), Ivan Sobicka, from the FEL, told CTK on Monday.
The assessment of the operation of the system showed that CVUT saved approximately 18 percent of the heating costs, or 800,000 crowns, in each of the seven winter seasons.
This is said to be the first application of model predictive control on a heating system in Europe. The computer programme controls the optimal heat distribution in the building, taking into account the development of temperatures inside and outside, the weather forecast and other parameters.
The CVUT experts were developing the algorithms for several years, in cooperation with their colleagues from the University of California in Berkeley and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
“With hindsight, it is an extraordinary success of our research and development. Articles about this topic are frequently cited and they belong among the fundamental publications in this field,” FEL Department of Control Engineering head Michal Sebek said.
The operation of the control system is not expensive and it does not require large changes in the heating system. In 2011-17, this method was applied in other buildings both the Czech Republic and abroad, for example in the Berkeley Library in California.
